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  <title>Welcome Jessica Tallon, MediaGoblin's second full time hire</title>
  <meta name="date" contents="2014-07-28 11:20" />
  <meta name="author" contents="Christopher Allan Webber" />
  <meta name="tags" contents="mediagoblin, hire, federation" />
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<p class="blog_image">
  <a href="/blog_images/jessica_tallon_screenshot.png"
     ><img src="/blog_images/jessica_tallon_screenshot-scaled.jpg"
           alt="Dropdown menu for administrative features" /></a>
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<p>
  I'm excited to announce that MediaGoblin has hired its second
  full-time programmer: Jessica Tallon!  Those of you who follow
  MediaGoblin closely may recognize that name: Jessica
  <a href="/news/summer-of-awesome.html">joined us</a>
  as part of
  <a href="/news/opw-gsoc-2013.html">our Outreach Program for Women participation last year</a>
  (she wrote about her
  <a href="/news/jessica-tallon-wrapping-up-opw.html">experiences with
  the program on this blog</a>).
  Jessica has been working on
  <a href="/news/pump-api-progress.html">federation support</a> in the
  project.
</p>

<p class="centered">
  <a href="/pages/campaign.html"
     ><img src="/images/campaign/milestone_characters/unlock_characters-second_milestone_unlocked.png"
           alt="Second milestone (60k) unlocked!" /></a>
</p>

<p>
  Since our <a href="/pages/campaign.html">crowdfunding campaign</a>
  was a <a href="/news/campaign-success.html">massive success,
  reaching its second milestone</a>, that was enough funds to bring
  Jessica on full time.  (You may be wondering: what about me (Chris
  Webber) then?  Am I still full time on the project?  The answer is
  "nearly"; I am full time without pay for now, but will be picking up
  a small amount of contracting to cover the bills so I will be at the
  status "nearly full time"... thus MediaGoblin will have mostly two
  full time people on staff at the moment!)  You might notice that the
  number of dedicated resources on the project corresponds with the
  "number of goblins unlocked".  That's no coincidence... we made no
  official announcements because we couldn't be sure until everything
  was arranged, but the number of goblins on that page was the number
  of dedicated resources we hoped to pull in.  Luckily, we were able
  to make an arrangement and pull in Jessica.  That's great news for
  MediaGoblin!
</p>

<p>
  Already, the results are showing themselves.  Jessica only joined a
  couple of weeks ago and already she has landed the first major
  milestone for federation (not federation itself, but the upload
  API... it'll be in the next release, so more soon!) and has been
  helping get 0.7.0 out the door.  The results speak for themselves!
</p>

<p>
  But even though the results speak so clearly, there's nothing like
  hearing right from the source!  As such, Deb Nicholson was kind
  enough to interview Jessica... so without further ado, here is their
  conversation below!
</p>

<hr />

<p>
  <b>Deb:</b>
  <i>
  You started working on GNU MediaGoblin through an Outreach Program for
  Women internship. What initially drew you to MediaGoblin, instead of one of
  the other fine projects that offer paid summer internships?
  </i>
</p>
 
<p>
  <b>Jessica:</b>
MediaGoblin was a perfect fit for both me and what I wanted to work
on. The welcoming community was something which was immediately
apparent, I wanted to work on a project which was going to be
welcoming and for me to feel like I could continue after OPW had
concluded. I also wanted a project which would provide me with any
help I might need while getting to grips with the code. It was clear
that MediaGoblin was a perfect fit for me in that respect.
</p>
 
<p>
  <b>Deb:</b>
  <i>
    You spent last summer re-writing the <a href="http://pypump.org/">PyPump</a>
    library. Are projects besides GNU MediaGoblin using your work?
  </i>
</p>
 
<p>
  <b>Jessica:</b>
  I've seen several projects which are using PyPump as well as interest in
  helping develop the library itself.
  <a href="https://pypi.python.org/pypi/spigot/">Spigot</a> is a
  program written against PyPump that allows posting to RSS feeds to
  <a href="http://pump.io/">pump.io</a>.
  There is also <a href="https://gitorious.org/pumpmigrate">PumpMigrate</a>
  which migrates data from one account to another, this could be
  really useful both on pump.io and MediaGoblin to allow someone to
  move their account to a different instance.
</p>
 
<p>
  <b>Deb:</b>
  <i>
  You'll be working on GNU MediaGoblin's federation branch for the next year.
What do you think the biggest or most challenging part is going to be?
  </i>
</p>
 
<p>
  <b>Jessica:</b>
  I think that there will be two big and difficult aspects I will encounter over
the next year. The first will be across instance subscriptions which would
allow you to subscribe to a collection or user and have updates to those be
visible on your instance even though they exist and have been uploaded to
another instance.</p>

<p>The second and possibly the most difficult but also most rewarding part will
be the sharing of media. This will allow you to share some media uploaded from
a mediagoblin instance via your own mediagoblin account possibly on another
server or even a pump.io instance. Permissions on how users will be able to
interact with the media by commenting, favoriting or re-sharing will make the
problem interesting but brings challenges.</p>

<p>
  <b>Deb:</b>
  <i>
  What do you think GNU MediaGoblin will look like in 3 years time?
  </i>
</p>

<p>
  <b>Jessica:</b>
  This is a very difficult, over the last year that I've been apart of the
project I've seen so much happen. I think within 3 years we'll have mature
federation support which will make running your own instance easy without
isolating yourself from the social aspects of sharing your media. There's also
lots I see happening from others in the project for easier deployability which
will hopefully make deploying a MediaGoblin instance much more achievable for a
lot more people.</p>

<p>
  I am so excited to see what unexpected changes occur over the next 3 years.
  There are so many contributors and it's such a wonderful community and project
  that I know I'm always going to be blown away by what can be achieved by
  everyone involved.
</p>

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